> Europe created the Russia-Ukraine problem by giving their energy security to Russia.
> This warning has been completely vindicated.
That's funny. The US warned Europe of dependence on Russia all the while promoting policies that antagonized Russia in Europe (e.g. NATO expansion). It's almost like the US wanted to push Europe and Russia against each other, so that it could sell its way more expensive natural gas in Europe!? Perhaps they did not anticipate the Russians would be bold enough to go to war on that, but they were certainly willing to accept the risk.
> It's the same 1930s economic conditions that gave rise to fascism last time.
Please. Europe may have some issues , but it's not nearly as bleak as you try to make it... I live here, I go around a lot. Europe is as affluent as ever. People are having a good time, in general. In the 1930's some countries had hyperinflation... you're comparing that to 5% yearly inflation these days?
> Europe has also outsourced their security to the US via NATO.
On that we agree. It was a really bad decision, but understandable given how much the US soft power after WWII was absorbed by Europeans. Some Europeans act like European countries are US states. They take to the streets to join movements that are 100% American, like BLM. It's bizarre.
> What happens to Europe with an expansionist Russia and no US security guarantee?
It shocks me that people like you think Russia is a serious threat to all of Europe, rather than just Ukraine (and maybe Moldova and Georgia if you push it).
How can you justify that view? Russia has not drawn any red lines about anything related to the rest of Europe like it had with Ukraine and Georgia (which was thoroughly ignored by Europe, with the strong support and should I say it, advice of the USA), it has not said anything as threatening as Trump saying Greenland will be part of America the nice way or the hard way, yet you believe the US is not a threat, but Russia is. There's some serious dissonance in this line of thought.
> Oh and speaking of worker protections, what happens when the price of bailing out European energy or security issues is the privatizing of your otherwise universal healthcare?
Americans have been saying this for 50 years... they just can't accept that the system has been working well in Europe for workers for all this time (though not as much for companies, as you can clearly notice it's much harder to make behemoths like FAANG in Europe, no doubt because without exploiting workers you can't really do that).
> The US warned Europe of dependence on Russia all the while promoting policies that antagonized Russia in Europe (e.g. NATO expansion)
I think there's a certain amount of historical revisionism going on with this. It is complicated however.
You can point to George W. Bush opening the door to NATO membership in 2006 [1] as a turning point but NATO had been gobbling up former Communist bloc countries for more than a decade.
Another noteworthy event is the 2014 revolution that ousted Russian puppet Viktor Yanukovych as the president of Ukraine, culminating in the Minsk Agreement (and Minsk II) to settle disputes in the Dombas and elsewhere.
Russia does have legitimate security concerns int he region such as access to the Black Sea and not having NATO on their border. And by "legitimate" here I simply mean that Europe and the EU do the exact same thing, most notably when the US almost started World War 3 over Soviet influence in Cuba (which itself was a response to the US installing nuclear MRBMs in Turkey). Also, in terms of the threat of a conventional land war, Ukraine is basically a massive highway into Russia, previously used by both Hitler and Napoleon. Not that it worked out well for either.
Whatever the case, having another Belarus in Ukraine was ideal for Russia and I think their designs on this long predated any talk of Ukraine joining NATO, which was DOA anyway. Germany, in particular, were always going to veto expanding NATO to share a border with Russia.
My point here is I'm not convinced that any promises of neutrality by Ukraine would've saved Ukraine from Russian designs.
> Europe is as affluent as ever
Based on what? Personal anecdotes? The EU acknowledges a housing crisis [2].
> It shocks me that people like you think Russia is a serious threat to all of Europe,
It is a serious threat. Not in the conventional land-war a la WW2 sense but we're dealing with the world's other nuclear superpower (China doesn't have the nuclear arsenal Russia does, by choice). But Putin's playbook is oddly reminiscent to Hitler's playbook leading up to the war. That is, Hitler argued he was unifying Germans in Austria, the Sudetenland, etc. Similarly, Putin is using ethnically Russian populations in a similar way: as an excuse to intervene and take territory.
There is a significant Russian population in Latvia who are stateless. IIRC it's estimated there are more than 200,000 of them.
American security and energy guarantees are really the only things holding Europe together right now. If NATO splinters, what's to stop Russia from seizing parts of Latvia?
This situation is precarious.
> they just can't accept that the system has been working well in Europe for workers for all this time
No, they don't care that it works. In fact, they've been doing everything they can to make it not work. We now have a generation of people in many European countries (and I include the UK here) who have never not known austerity and constant government cutbacks. Satisfaction with the NHS deteriorates as it's been deliberately starved for 15+ years.
This is a well-worn and successful playbook called starving the beast [3]. It's laying the groundwork for a push for privatization. It'll be partial privatization to start with and just creep from there.
I'm not sure you truly appreciate just how much US foreign policy is designed to advance the interests of American corporations.
> You can point to George W. Bush opening the door to NATO membership in 2006 [1] as a turning point but NATO had been gobbling up former Communist bloc countries for more than a decade.
The 1990's Russia was a hugely struggling nation that could barely feed its population, but even then they opposed NATO expansion strongly!
> The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990.
> Based on what? Personal anecdotes? The EU acknowledges a housing crisis [2].
The housing crisis is mostly limited to inflated prices in large cities and is itself evidence that people have a good purchasing power, since it's not being driven by foreign capital (at least where I live, in the Nordics).
Which statistics show the EU is NOT affluent?? If we look at GDP (+1.35% yearly in the last 10 years [1], not too bad for developed economies) and unemployment (currently around 6% for the whole EU [2]), it's not bad, especially if you consider the huge number of recent immigrants (unemployment among the native population is much lower than the total figures show, in Sweden, for example, native Swedes have near full employment).
But yeah, I think personal anedoctes are also helpful to establish whether a country looks like it's going down... and everywhere I go, I see only good signs: shops expanding, lots of new buildings, full bars and restaurants, people are driving the latest electric cars... what I don't see is things like businesses closing down, struggling local shops etc. which are normally very visible (I know, I've seen that) in economies that are in dire straits.
> There is a significant Russian population in Latvia who are stateless. IIRC it's estimated there are more than 200,000 of them.
Yes, I've been to Latvia and Russian is clearly spoken by a large percentage of the population (to my surprise, including the young generation). As long as they are not suppressed from speaking their language (as is happening in Ukraine right now and even before the war, and in some areas in the Baltic countries) and they're not made second-class citizens (as is happening in Estonia, where they can no long vote [3]), Putin will not have any excuse to do that, and those countries would be wise to not provide such excuses! Anyway, I think that regardless of that, NATO will survive even without the USA (as something else, perhaps, but the union between European states is extremely important to maintain) and I really belive Article 5 will exist even if NATO evolves into a Europe-only alliance.
> I'm not sure you truly appreciate just how much US foreign policy is designed to advance the interests of American corporations.
Not sure what you're referring to... I think I do appreciate it. The interview [4] Trump had with the American oil companies after the partial "annexation" of Venezuela couldn't be a better example of that.
> This warning has been completely vindicated.
That's funny. The US warned Europe of dependence on Russia all the while promoting policies that antagonized Russia in Europe (e.g. NATO expansion). It's almost like the US wanted to push Europe and Russia against each other, so that it could sell its way more expensive natural gas in Europe!? Perhaps they did not anticipate the Russians would be bold enough to go to war on that, but they were certainly willing to accept the risk.
> It's the same 1930s economic conditions that gave rise to fascism last time.
Please. Europe may have some issues , but it's not nearly as bleak as you try to make it... I live here, I go around a lot. Europe is as affluent as ever. People are having a good time, in general. In the 1930's some countries had hyperinflation... you're comparing that to 5% yearly inflation these days?
> Europe has also outsourced their security to the US via NATO.
On that we agree. It was a really bad decision, but understandable given how much the US soft power after WWII was absorbed by Europeans. Some Europeans act like European countries are US states. They take to the streets to join movements that are 100% American, like BLM. It's bizarre.
> What happens to Europe with an expansionist Russia and no US security guarantee?
It shocks me that people like you think Russia is a serious threat to all of Europe, rather than just Ukraine (and maybe Moldova and Georgia if you push it). How can you justify that view? Russia has not drawn any red lines about anything related to the rest of Europe like it had with Ukraine and Georgia (which was thoroughly ignored by Europe, with the strong support and should I say it, advice of the USA), it has not said anything as threatening as Trump saying Greenland will be part of America the nice way or the hard way, yet you believe the US is not a threat, but Russia is. There's some serious dissonance in this line of thought.
> Oh and speaking of worker protections, what happens when the price of bailing out European energy or security issues is the privatizing of your otherwise universal healthcare?
Americans have been saying this for 50 years... they just can't accept that the system has been working well in Europe for workers for all this time (though not as much for companies, as you can clearly notice it's much harder to make behemoths like FAANG in Europe, no doubt because without exploiting workers you can't really do that).